First, I should say that from my perspective this path was already
agreed on in the project, and I think that an incoming DPL should need
rather strong reasons to abort existing spending plans (and if so should
make it a prominent part of their platform). Since we potentially
change DPL every year, but many parts of the project work on a longer
timescale, we would have major problems if each incoming DPL reopened
decisions about hardware spending, the DebConf budget, etc.

Having said that, when I first heard about the planned level of
spending for new hardware, I was a little concerned about it. In part,
it wasn't clear to me (just as an interested Debian member) how much
cost/benefit analysis had been done for different options, though I
mostly trusted that the involved people were making a sensible decision.

More significantly, I wanted to see clearly that we would try to
balance spending by fundraising, not just run down existing Debian funds
then have a problem later -- of course, money sitting unused isn't
helpful, but we should weigh up the benefits of alternative uses of
money. And while it might not be relevant for a few years given the
economic situation, I would prefer it if we continued to seek
appropriate hardware donations, in the hope of shifting back towards
more donated hardware if it became possible.

If I had been DPL when the hardware replacement plan was first
proposed, I'm rather confident that you would have persuaded me it made
sense, I'm just trying to describe the kinds of ways that I want us to
think "carefully" about money.

As a more general point, I also think that for the longer-term we need
to establish some clearer conventions about how we authorise non-urgent
spending. The constitution says,

"[The DPL may] In consultation with the developers, make decisions
affecting property held in trust for purposes related to Debian. (See
§9.). Such decisions are communicated to the members by the Project
Leader or their Delegate(s). Major expenditures should be proposed and
debated on the mailing list before funds are disbursed"

but I don't think we have any convention on what counts as major. And,
even after a debate, the DPL can ignore the real consensus. While most
decisions in Debian can be reversed later, once money is spent we can't
override that.

@all: do you think Debian should do a fundraising campain where we
collect a larger amount of money dedicated to Debian's hardware
infrastructure?

I would like us to do more active fundraising in general. Spending
money on hardware will be a clearly positive use of donations for most
donors. I don't think it will help us to split hardware infrastructure
fundraising into a separate fund, but it might be useful to run a
fundraising campaign which promotes this specific need.